Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

A friend of mine has long claimed that everything that dark horse touches turns to shit, and I must admit I'm inclined to agree with him. This was the first Dirty Pair comics done for Dark Horse, having lost one of the two American writers. At first I really enjoyed this graphic novel, it seemed like they were trying to add some character depth to the pair, which started nice, but then ended up taking away what's best about them. In this book they enter a strange virtual reality, that turns out to be one twisted man's obsession with them combined with a desire to destroy the world. What's the strangest thing was that the pair didn't kill ANYONE, accidentally or not. There were no unintended mass civilian deaths, not even one! It seemed like they were attempting to write a more serious story, developing the characters while still attempting to leave plenty of visual "cheesecake" but it just didn't work for me and I missed the lightheartedness of the earlier comics. It was ok, but I don't think I'll be reading anymore. Still it was enjoyable to go back and re-read these comics after so many years.

When I was a teenager me and my best friends in America all collected the Dirty Pair comics, though they had much more than me. So I was quite pleased when I found the first 4 collections of stories for very little money at our local charity shop. I'm afraid the comics weren't quite as funny as I remembered. The premise was quite good, cute young women working on the side of good but killing millions more people than they save.

The first story was an introduction to the pair and their cat, it contained the infamous "bloody card" and quite a bit of cute mayhem. There was a bit of an odd feeling to the stories. It felt that an over-the-top comedy anime pair had been put into a rather big cyberpunk world. In the first collection they go to hunt down a bio-tech operator on behalf of another bio-tech operator.

The third story sees the girls confined to a planet and assigned a reporter to improve their image with a sympathetic piece on them. I think of the three this is the funniest story, particularly the way the reporter envisions the acts of destruction the girls go through. Though this does feel like the biggest difference between the anime comedy and the cyberpunk setting. The villains are pure cyberpunk, obsessed with sex and transferring themselves to different bodies through use of their cyberwear. At one point one of them seems to be using an ipad which considering this was written in the mid-late 80s is pretty cool!

While not a great comic it was fun to go back and read these for the nostalgia.

The second story is probably my favorite of the first three, the pair go up against Shasti, a woman who was engineered to be the ultimate agent, grown in a vat, given split personality and generally royally fucked over by the agency that made her. Eventually she manages to break free of her programming and go rogue. It's interesting as despite her evil she's a sympathetic villain, and all the flashbacks to the early days of the pair are interesting and enjoyable. Plus it has Kei quite drunk which is very amusing!